An update from an American anti-virus company affected Microsoft. This affected the operations of airlines, TV telecast, banking and many corporate companies around the world for 15 hours from 5 am to 8 pm on Friday (July 19). About 1400 flights have been cancelled. Due to the shutdown of online services, flight boarding passes were given by hand at many airports.
You may have never heard of anti-virus firm CrowdStrike before, but what the company did with its virus scanner Falcon affected millions of computers running Microsoft Windows operating system. Microsoft informed about this at around 5 am. However, Apple and Linux users were not affected.
In India too, its biggest impact was seen at the airport. Online services like airline check-in were affected by this. Heavy crowds were seen at airports across the country including Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bengaluru. Due to lack of information, people waited for hours at the airport. This outage did not have much impact on any other service in the country.
Computers around the world started restarting automatically, the screen turned blue
‘Blue Screen of Death’ was reported around the world. Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is a critical error screen that appears on the Windows operating system. When this error occurs, the computer restarts automatically. There is also a possibility of losing data.
After this outage, Microsoft immediately said that it was a “third party issue”. In other words – it was not its fault. This entire incident shows how much the world is dependent on these big companies, and how powerless it leaves us when they fail.
Microsoft’s service stopped due to CrowdStrike’s update
Microsoft’s Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365 services have been troubled due to CrowdStrike’s update. Microsoft said, “We are aware of the problem and have deployed several teams to resolve it. We have found out the cause.” Only those users have been affected who use Microsoft Azure.
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform. It works to create, deploy and manage applications and services. Microsoft 365 is productivity software, which includes popular applications like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Outlook and One Note.